Abstract: We present hidden fluid mechanics (HFM), a physics informed deep learning
framework capable of encoding an important class of physical laws governing
fluid motions, namely the Navier-Stokes equations. In particular, we seek to
leverage the underlying conservation laws (i.e., for mass, momentum, and
energy) to infer hidden quantities of interest such as velocity and pressure
fields merely from spatio-temporal visualizations of a passive scaler (e.g.,
dye or smoke), transported in arbitrarily complex domains (e.g., in human
arteries or brain aneurysms). Our approach towards solving the aforementioned
data assimilation problem is unique as we design an algorithm that is agnostic
to the geometry or the initial and boundary conditions. This makes HFM highly
flexible in choosing the spatio-temporal domain of interest for data
acquisition as well as subsequent training and predictions. Consequently, the
predictions made by HFM are among those cases where a pure machine learning
strategy or a mere scientific computing approach simply cannot reproduce. The
proposed algorithm achieves accurate predictions of the pressure and velocity
fields in both two and three dimensional flows for several benchmark problems
motivated by real-world applications. Our results demonstrate that this
relatively simple methodology can be used in physical and biomedical problems
to extract valuable quantitative information (e.g., lift and drag forces or
wall shear stresses in arteries) for which direct measurements may not be
possible.